Randy Franke: 1997 County leader of the year

The intergovernmental group brought together under the auspices of the Nature Conservancy to discuss environmental issues was not a crowd predisposed to warm and fuzzy feelings about politicians. And Randy Franke, who was giving the keynote address, was not just a politician.

He was a small-town Republican, and small-town Republicans, particularly those from the West where residents tend to view the word “environment” as a euphemism for “land grab,” were not exactly the Nature Conservancy’s favorite keynote speakers.

Franke, a Marion County, Ore., commissioner who was at the time president of the National Association of Counties, was operating under no illusions.

He knew he was talking to a group with which some local governments had enjoyed a cool – if not downright hostile – relationship. But he was confident that he could win these people over.

So for 30 minutes he talked, discussing at length the necessity for collaboration between communities, landowners and environmentalists in efforts to preserve biodiversity and protect threatened species. The best intentions, he said, will come to naught if the local communities are not involved in preservation efforts. It was a speech Izaak Walton would have been proud to give.

When it was over, Franke sat down. Everyone else stood up.

A standing ovation, a rarity for any Nature Conservancy speaker, exploded around Franke, the small-town Republican politician from the West.

“He understands that conservation and protection of the environment are not something you can impose on a community,” says John Sawhill, president of the Nature Conservancy. “It has to come from the community.”

The thing is, as interesting a story as it is, the Nature Conservancy speech anecdote is no aberration. Ask anyone who has known Franke or worked with him in any capacity to describe him, and one word dominates:

“He’s very into collaboration,” says NACo Director of Community Services Jeff McNeil, who has worked with Franke on sustainability issues.

“He believes in collaboration,” says Jeff Arnold, NACo’s associate legislative director for western issues.

“He is a collaborator,” says NACo Executive Director Larry Naake.

There is no better example of that talent than his work on the President’s Council on Sustainable Development, out of which sprang something called the Joint Center for Sustainable Communities, a cooperative effort of NACo and the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

“Everybody knows that the relationship between mayors and county representatives has not always been smooth,” says council co-chair Jonathan Lash of the World Resources Institute. “In the creation of the center, we had to overcome some strain. But Randy and (Seattle Mayor) Norm Rice made it work. I was enormously impressed.”

Franke’s greatest strength, according to those close to him, is that he makes himself not only see every viewpoint, but respect every viewpoint. It has made him one of Oregon’s most effective politicians and thrust him into the national spotlight as a spokesman for the nation’s counties. And it has made him American City & County’s 1997 County Leader of the Year.

Small-Town Roots

Franke grew up cleaning out hog pens, so a career in politics was probably inevitable. His parents ran a working farm in rural Marion County, and that connection to the land colors much of his philosophy, both political and personal.

He is not a tree-hugger, but his environmentalism is deep and sincere. His commitment to children’s and family issues is not phony and forced as it is with many politicians. And his persuasiveness is not the blow-dried, “you-scratch-my-back . . .” sort. In short, Franke, the consummate politician, seems nothing like a politician.

Still, he admits it is in his blood. “I have been interested in history and politics since early in high school,” he says. That interest was cultivated at the University of Oregon – Franke says it was known as “The Berkeley of the North” during the Vietnam War – and reinforced during arguments with his Republican father about the righteousness of the war. (His father took the anti-war side.)

His college years were also his introduction to county work. “The county road department has a program where they hire college kids for truck driving, digging ditches, that kind of thing,” Franke says. That job, interrupted by a stint in the navy, gave him the contacts he would need to make county work his life.

“The summer job led me to a parttime job analyzing the 1973 Oregon Safe Employment Act and its effect on the county,” Franke says. “I had to write a report stating what I felt the county should do to implement that law.”

In a clever gambit, Franke recommended that the county hire a risk manager to deal with the act and then promptly applied for the job. He remained there for five years, during which he headed up the employees’ grievance committee and was elected president of the local employees’ union. That in itself points to the political independence that is a hallmark of Oregon Republicans and marks Franke’s career. “How many Republican office-holders have been president of their local employees’ union?” he laughs.

The diversity of the risk manager’s job allowed Franke to get a look at all county departments and piqued his interest in county government even more. Still, he was a relative unknown when he tossed his hat in the ring for a county commissioner’s post.

“So I saved up my vacation time and took all of it – one month – and took another month off without pay and went door to door,” he says.

During his campaign, Franke called for better relations between the county and its employees and more involvement by the employees in policy development. “I recall,” he says, ruefully, “saying something about ‘a bridge to the 21st century.'”

Despite facing a heavily favored opponent who was a well-known, very active city councilwoman, Franke won the spot.

And could have almost immediately regretted it.

Garbage to Sustainability

That was 1978. Shortly after Franke took office, Marion County took a dive. “It was the forerunner of the Orange County (Calif.) fiscal crisis,” he says. “The county treasurer was heavily into ‘standby’ and ‘forward’ commitments. He was betting on the futures market. He lost $12.5 million of all the taxing district’s money that was in the pool. It sounds small compared to Orange County, but it was huge for us. Because we were cash poor, we couldn’t get through the end of the fiscal year with the cash on hand. We had to liquidate perfectly good long-term bonds in what was then a bad bond market. So we lost a total of $22 million.”

Franke, who had been in office little more than a year when the crisis hit, found himself responsible for figuring out how to make it a one-time catastrophe. Employee layoffs, combined with drastic spending cuts and a complete overhaul of the county’s internal accounting mechanisms, turned the tide.

Indeed, in each of the last 10 years, the Government Finance Officers Association has acknowledged Marion County’s budget document as one of the country’s best.

Additionally, taxpayers have forgiven the government enough to make Marion one of the most successful counties in the state at passing general operating levies.

Fiscal turnarounds are fine, but it was garbage that thrust Franke into the national spotlight. “We had an open garbage dump that needed to be closed,” he says. “It was one of the issues that dogged the commissioner whose seat I took.”

Ask Franke what he’d like on his tombstone, and he’s likely to answer, “Leader of the Marion County Resource Recovery Facility Project.” The facility, the first on the West Coast to be financed with floating/fixed rate, tax-exempt revenue bonds, is his pride and joy. It represented the first use of variable rate debt for the financing of a solid waste/resource recovery facility and is considered among the most environmentally friendly in the country.

Marion County taxpayers are expected to save $44 million over the life of the bond that financed the $70 million project. “I consider that one of my major accomplishments,” Franke says. “It is still operating successfully today, with all the environmental regulations that have been passed since it started.”

The homework that Franke did before the facility was built gave him a national reputation regarding solid waste issues. That reputation has broadened to include children’s issues and the matter of sustainable communities.

It is kids (he coaches softball) that command the bulk of his attention. As president of NACo in ’94-’95, he focused on a series of children’s initiatives that echoed what he had been doing in Marion County since his election. (Franke was a founding member of the policy committee responsible for a child health initiative implemented by only nine other communities in the United States, and created the Youth Compact Committee to provide a forum for local jurisdictions to share information and coordinate efforts to meet the needs of children in the county.)

Additionally, Franke has led Marion County’s effort to establish Community Progress Teams. The teams, all independent, were created using local high school districts, to study ways in which they could best meet the needs of children and families in their specific areas. Teams have created after- school, arts and crafts and parenting programs, as well as theater groups. The program has been a remarkable success, he says, although he refuses to take credit for anything beyond “shutting up and listening.

“I have a real strong belief that we are a lot better off when we focus on children earlier than we do now,” he says. “It’s a lot better to invest money early rather than spend it later on juvenile incarceration, etc.”

Franke has also been appointed to the State Commission on Children and Families, which is charged with working with local commissions to plan, implement and fund programs for kids and their families.

The interest in children and families led quite naturally into a devotion to the idea of sustainable communities. Again, his statewide reputation (he serves on the Willamette Valley Livability Forum Advisory Board and the Pacific Northwest Regional Council for Sustainable Development) has vaulted him onto the national stage with an appointment this year to the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. It is here that his ability to get along is especially prized.

“He has the ability to negotiate and mediate in a way very few people do,” says Arnold, who has worked with Franke on a number of public lands issues. “Sustainability issues are a good example. He has bridged gaps with westerners who think you’re trying to take away their land if you say, ‘environment.'”

The fact that Democratic governors and a Democratic president appointed Franke to each of the commissions and councils mentioned previously is testament to his broad appeal. “If what you’re talking about makes sense, he doesn’t care if you’re Democrat or a Republican,” says NACo’s McNeil.

Naake agrees. “He looks at issues as issues,” he says. “He came out of a public employee background. He’s not a definable liberal or conservative.”

Franke, in fact, downplays the importance of party. “County government is pretty nonpartisan. I consider myself a ‘Mark Hatfield Republican,'” he says, referring to Oregon’s former longtime senator, who enjoyed a reputation as a moderate, even when the GOP began pulling to the right. In fact, his relationship with Hatfield, his pal, worked to NACo’s advantage on more than one occasion. As president of NACo, Franke was critical in the counties’ efforts to get the Payment in Lieu of Taxes program fully funded. That program provides federal funds to offset the costs incurred by the nation’s 1,789 “public lands” counties for services they provide to federal employees and the users of those lands.

“He was very important in the whole effort,” says Hatfield, who led the push within Congress to increase PILT program funding, which had stagnated since 1976. “I was the lead person in Congress, and he mentored me in that role.”

Franke, Hatfield says, is effective partly because of his attention to detail. “Nothing gets by him,” he says. “He’s always been an enthusiastic person in some of the most ordinary details. His enthusiasm is contagious. He’s a pleasure to work with.”

Franke is also an opponent of any overarching government that would swamp community participation.

“He told me, ‘We don’t like a command-and-control mentality from Capitol Hill to the statehouse, or from the statehouse to the county courthouse, so why should we accept it from the courthouse to the neighborhood?'” McNeil says. “He has a willingness to share power that is refreshing in a politician. It’s a long-term strategy, and there is some risk associated with that. He’ll never be a ‘Headline News’ kinda guy. But he’ll always be effec tive.”